[VIDEO] Obama to Push for Reparations in 2016

In an outrageous move that is bound to create even more racial discord in America, Obama will push for reparations for slavery in 2016.

This prediction was made by Fox Business News host Charles Payne during Thursday’s episode of Making Money.fully supports the United Nations Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous People, so he will push for Americans to pay slave reparations as a way to satisfy the treaty.

“The news is a glimpse of much bigger news that is going to come from the White House, next year, I’m leaning towards,” Payne said, after talking about news in Chicago. “I think that there’s going to be an official apology from the White House to slavery in America and then a major push to get cash, and I’m talking lots of cash.”

“Many including those closest to President Obama will push him to make this happen,” Payne predicted, according to Mediaite. “I actually think it would be a major mistake. Instead, Obama should really discuss and focus on all of the progress we have made and how all Americans need to move forward for better days for all of our kids.”

A panel of guests joined Payne, who all agreed that ensuring the atrocities of slavery should never again occur, but moving forward with race relations will not occur by such a move.

“Sure, slavery was a horrible thing that happened, but this is not going to help race relations in the United States today,” Tea Party News Network’s Scottie Nell Hughes said. “It would be different if presidents today were affected themselves by something that happened back in the 1800s, but unfortunately, now all its going to do is cause more tension among the races.”

Payne notes that black farmers have been given $1.25 billion in reparations for alleged racial discrimination suffered under Department of Agriculture loan programs. Yet most of the recipients, who received upwards of $50,000 have never farmed, and subsequently blew the cash.

While Obama has indicated in the past that he is against paying reparations, there is some indication that may no longer be the case, as evidenced by a more localized version of reparations which he advocates in Chicago.

In the wake of the race-baiting that has occurred by this Administration and its proxies, such as Al Sharpton, such a move will undoubtedly create much contention amongst Americans, as the vast majority descend from families who never played a role in the slave trade – either as slaves or as slave owners – and in fact, immigrated to this country well past the abolishment of slavery in the U.S.

The Senate is scheduled to hold a rare Sunday evening vote on three Patriot Act provisions mere hours before they expire at midnight. The late hour — and lack of a clean path forward — means any single senator has an undue amount of leverage to gum up the works.

After staking his reputation on fighting the National Security Agency (NSA) to the bitter end, the Kentucky Republican and White House contender now finds himself with the best chance yet to hobble it.

"Tomorrow, I will force the expiration of the NSA illegal spy program," he said in a statement distributed by his presidential campaign.

"I do not do this to obstruct," he added. "I do it to build something better, more effective, more lasting, and more cognizant of who we are as Americans."

If he wanted to, Paul certainly could doom parts of the post-9/11 counterterrorism law — at least temporarily.

“It requires unanimous consent to get anything done by midnight — that gives him a lot of leverage,” said Nathan White, the senior legislative manager at Access, an advocacy group that supports reforming the law.

“He’s got a lot of ideological reason to do that, he’s got the support to do it, I don’t think it’s the reason he’s doing it but there’s a campaign financial interest on it,” White added. “He really could gum this up.”

After stalling on several plans to renew expiring provisions of the law last weekend, the Senate will come back to Washington on Sunday to make one last stab at saving three parts of the Patriot Act set to expire. Among the expiring provisions is Section 215 of the law, which the NSA has used to authorize its bulk collection of millions of Americans’ phone records.

Votes are possible after 6 p.m., giving senators just six hours before the laws run out at midnight — and only two before 8 p.m., when the Obama administration has warned the NSA's phone records program would be disrupted.

The only sure fire way to prevent the law from lapsing is for the Senate to pass the USA Freedom Act, which would have the NSA give up the phone records program. The bill passed the House with broad bipartisan support, 338-88, earlier this month.

Last weekend, the bill came three votes shy of the 60 it needed to overcome a procedural hurdle in the Senate. Many analysts suspect they might be able to get the votes on Sunday, since it is clearly the last best chance to keep the Patriot Act measures alive.

What happens then, though, is still up in the air.

Procedurally, if 60 senators voted to move onto the bill, lawmakers could have time to introduce amendments and vote on them before voting on final passage. At the wish of any single lawmaker, the process could be delayed until Tuesday — more than a day after the laws die.

It’s at this moment when Paul — as well as allies including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) — would have the most leverage.

Paul has said he would not object to moving ahead on the bill if he were able to bring two amendments up for a simple majority vote. If Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) prevents that from happening, he would have every reason to kill the law.

There’s a lot of pressure on Paul to go big.

His staunch opposition to the NSA has been a major factor in his presidential campaign, and on Friday the campaign announced an “emergency 48 hour ‘NSA Spying Showdown’ Money Bomb.”

A super-PAC aligned with Paul also released an aggressive wrestling-themed attack adcalling the Sunday floor fight “the greatest brawl for liberty of the century.”

Even if Paul is able to propose his amendments, he could still torpedo the process.

Paul’s office has declined to say exactly which two amendments he would demand a vote on, but it has issued a list of ten possible measures he has co-written with Wyden.

On that longer list are amendments to close a “backdoor search loophole” that allows the government to collect Americans’ communications under a provision meant to target foreigners. One measure would prevent the government from forcing companies to give them “backdoors” to crack their encryption, and another would rein in an expansive executive order that has been used to condone various types of government spying.

Many of those measures have received strong bipartisan support in the House. Many civil libertarian senators would be hard pressed to vote against them.

At the same time, defenders of the NSA might also be able to introduce amendments that could get significant support. Many lawmakers have been concerned that the USA Freedom Act would not require phone companies to hold onto their customers’ data for any specific length of time. A measure forcing them to retain the data could get broad support.

“I think that amendments could be very problematic, depending on the amendments,” said Harley Geiger, advocacy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, which supports the USA Freedom Act. “It could kill the bill.”

Passage of any single amendment would doom the effort. If the Senate passed anything other than the exact bill that moved through the House that would force the two chambers to work out their differences, taking lawmakers past the Sunday midnight deadline.

The multiple moving parts — and lack of a clear plan from anyone involved — makes it seem all the more likely than ever that Congress lets the law die, at least temporarily.

“I think there’s more of a chance of it expiring than anything else right now, just because there’s so many different factors,” said one lobbyist working on the issue.

Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina told a packed audience that a huge, complex and sometimes corrupt government was "crushing the potential" of Americans.

"That is not hyperbole," she said. "That is fact."

When democracy becomes so big and powerful, and so costly and complex, Fiorina said, only the big, powerful, wealthy and well-connected can handle it.

"The small and the powerless get crushed," she said.

At the Delaware GOP convention in Wilmington on Saturday morning, Fiorina came out strong against Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, questioning why the former U.S. secretary of state has answered so few on-the-record questions.

Fiorina called on Clinton to explain why the Clinton Foundation received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments while Clinton was secretary of state.

In her travels since announcing her candidacy, Fiorina said she's discovered a disquiet among the general public. The disquiet is not partisan or political, it is across generations and across ethic groups, she said.

"It is a disquiet, I think, that comes from a fear that they are losing something," Fiorina said. "I think what people feel we are losing is the sense of limitless possibility that has always defined this nation."

Fiorina said Washington needs more leaders, not managers. Managers are happy to go along and exist within the status quo while leaders take risks, she said.

The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Fiorina said she has the expertise as a leader to be president. The country is at a pivotal point in its history where strong leadership is needed, she said.

While on the campaign trail, Fiorina said she's often asked why she's so critical of Clinton.

"It has nothing to do with the fact that either one of us are women. It has to do with this fact: 82 percent of the American people now believe that we have a professional political class that is more focused on preserving its power and privilege than it is on doing the people's work," she said.

"Bill and Hillary Clinton are the personification of the professional political class," she said.

The New Nationwide Crime Wave

The consequences of the ‘Ferguson effect’ are already appearing. The main victims of growing violence will be the inner-city poor.

The nation’s two-decades-long crime decline may be over. Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing.

Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.

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Those citywide statistics from law-enforcement officials mask even more startling neighborhood-level increases. Shooting incidents are up 500% in an East Harlem precinct compared with last year; in a South Central Los Angeles police division, shooting victims are up 100%.

By contrast, the first six months of 2014 continued a 20-year pattern of growing public safety. Violent crime in the first half of last year dropped 4.6% nationally and property crime was down 7.5%. Though comparable national figures for the first half of 2015 won’t be available for another year, the January through June 2014 crime decline is unlikely to be repeated.

The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months.

Since last summer, the airwaves have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today. A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest—including Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., in July 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore last month—have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, before he stepped down last month, embraced the conceit that law enforcement in black communities is infected by bias. The news media pump out a seemingly constant stream of stories about alleged police mistreatment of blacks, with the reports often buttressed by cellphone videos that rarely capture the behavior that caused an officer to use force.

Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now provokes angry protests, like those that followed the death of Vonderrit Myers in St. Louis last October. The 18-year-old Myers, awaiting trial on gun and resisting-arrest charges, had fired three shots at an officer at close range. Arrests in black communities are even more fraught than usual, with hostile, jeering crowds pressing in on officers and spreading lies about the encounter.

Acquittals of police officers for the use of deadly force against black suspects are now automatically presented as a miscarriage of justice. Proposals aimed at producing more cop convictions abound, but New York state seems especially enthusiastic about the idea.

The state’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, wants to create a special state prosecutor dedicated solely to prosecuting cops who use lethal force. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo would appoint an independent monitor whenever a grand jury fails to indict an officer for homicide and there are “doubts” about the fairness of the proceeding (read: in every instance of a non-indictment); the governor could then turn over the case to a special prosecutor for a second grand jury proceeding.

This incessant drumbeat against the police has resulted in what St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson last November called the “Ferguson effect.” Cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity and the “criminal element is feeling empowered,” Mr. Dotson reported. Arrests in St. Louis city and county by that point had dropped a third since the shooting of Michael Brown in August. Not surprisingly, homicides in the city surged 47% by early November and robberies in the county were up 82%.

Similar “Ferguson effects” are happening across the country as officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric. Arrests in Baltimore were down 56% in May compared with 2014.

“Any cop who uses his gun now has to worry about being indicted and losing his job and family,” a New York City officer tells me. “Everything has the potential to be recorded. A lot of cops feel that the climate for the next couple of years is going to be nonstop protests.”

Police officers now second-guess themselves about the use of force. “Officers are trying to invent techniques on the spot for taking down resistant suspects that don’t look as bad as the techniques taught in the academy,” says Jim Dudley, who recently retired as deputy police chief in San Francisco. Officers complain that civilians don’t understand how hard it is to control someone resisting arrest.

A New York City cop tells me that he was amazed to hear people scoffing that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who killed Michael Brown, only looked a “little red” after Brown assaulted him and tried to grab his weapon: “Does an officer need to be unconscious before he can use force? If someone is willing to fight you, he’s also willing to take your gun and shoot you. You can’t lose a fight with a guy who has already put his hands on you because if you do, you will likely end up dead.”

Milwaukee Police Chief Edward A. Flynn, discussing hostility toward the police, told me in an interview on Friday: “I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m guessing it will take five years to recover.”

Even if officer morale were to miraculously rebound, policies are being put into place that will make it harder to keep crime down in the future. Those initiatives reflect the belief that any criminal-justice action that has a disparate impact on blacks is racially motivated.

In New York, pedestrian stops—when the police question and sometimes frisk individuals engaged in suspicious behavior—have dropped nearly 95% from their 2011 high, thanks to litigation charging that the NYPD’s stop, question and frisk practices were racially biased. A judge agreed, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, upon taking office last year, did too, embracing the resulting judicial monitoring of the police department. It is no surprise that shootings are up in the city.

Politicians and activists in New York and other cities have now taken aim at “broken windows” policing. This police strategy has shown remarkable success over the past two decades by targeting low-level public-order offenses, reducing the air of lawlessness in rough neighborhoods and getting criminals off the streets before they commit bigger crimes. Opponents of broken-windows policing somehow fail to notice that law-abiding residents of poor communities are among the strongest advocates for enforcing laws against public drinking, trespassing, drug sales and drug use, among other public-order laws.

As attorney general, Eric Holder pressed the cause of ending “mass incarceration” on racial grounds; elected officials across the political spectrum have jumped on board. A 2014 California voter initiative has retroactively downgraded a range of property and drug felonies to misdemeanors, including forcible theft of guns, purses and laptops. More than 3,000 felons have already been released from California prisons, according to the Association of Deputy District Attorneys in Los Angeles County. Burglary, larceny and car theft have surged in the county, the association reports.

“There are no real consequences for committing property crimes anymore,” Los Angeles Police Lt. Armando Munoz told Downtown News earlier this month, “and the criminals know this.” The Milwaukee district attorney, John Chisholm, is diverting many property and drug criminals to rehabilitation programs to reduce the number of blacks in Wisconsin prisons; critics see the rise in Milwaukee crime as one result.

If these decriminalization and deincarceration policies backfire, the people most harmed will be their supposed beneficiaries: blacks, since they are disproportionately victimized by crime. The black death-by-homicide rate is six times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined. The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other black civilians, not the police. The police could end all use of lethal force tomorrow and it would have at most a negligible impact on the black death rate. In any case, the strongest predictor of whether a police officer uses force is whether a suspect resists arrest, not the suspect’s race.

Contrary to the claims of the “black lives matter” movement, no government policy in the past quarter century has done more for urban reclamation than proactive policing. Data-driven enforcement, in conjunction with stricter penalties for criminals and “broken windows” policing, has saved thousands of black lives, brought lawful commerce and jobs to once drug-infested neighborhoods and allowed millions to go about their daily lives without fear.

To be sure, police officers need to treat everyone they encounter with courtesy and respect. Any fatal police shooting of an innocent person is a horrifying tragedy that police training must work incessantly to prevent. But unless the demonization of law enforcement ends, the liberating gains in urban safety over the past 20 years will be lost.

Where does CNN find these idiots?

Deborah C. Tyler

On Friday May 29, CNN's New Day show featured Chris Cuomo bloviating about a draw Mohammed free speech gathering in Arizona. He said the contest was not a freedom issue, because the right to free speech is certain, but rather a moral issue. He likened the contest to the use of the N-word.

In fact, use of that word is selectively defined as hate speech. And moral or not, under those laws, it is illegal. Cuomo and Pamela Geller got into shouting match over that analogy. Cuomo went on to opine that the other real problem with the event, in addition to its immorality, was that there is not enough gun control, because a Marine had advised people to bring their guns.

Mr. Cuomo forgot that it was a citizen bearing a legal gun who prevented a massacre in Geller's draw Mohammed contest just a few weeks ago!

Cuomo thinks it is immoral, in itself, to use free speech that offends a differing opinion. But most astonishing was his assertion that "[t]he First and Second Amendments weren't put together to defend each other, that's for sure." Does Cuomo really not see the significance of the sequence of these amendments – the enumeration of rights followed by the right to bear arms to protect them? Can he really believe that the First and Second Amendments are not related?

The Truth about Islamic Jizya

Raymond Ibrahim

The Return of Jizya

Muslim demands for non-Muslim "infidels" to pay jizya on pain of death are growing, even as the West fluctuates between having no clue what jizya is and thinking that jizya is an example of "tolerance" in Islam.

In the video where the Islamic State slaughtered some 30 Christian Ethiopians in Libya last April, the spokesman repeatedly pointed out that payment of jizya (which the impoverished Ethiopian migrant workers could not render, nor the 21 Copts before them) is the only way for Christians around the world to safeguard their lives:

But whoever refuses [to pay jizya] will see nothing from us but the edge of a spear. The men will be killed and the children will be enslaved, and their wealth will be taken as booty. This is the judgment of Allah and His Messenger.

When the Islamic State invaded ancient Christian regions around the Nineveh Plain last June, it again declared: "We offer them [Assyrian Christians] three choices: Islam; the dhimma contract – involving payment of jizya; if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword."

The Islamic State – which most Western politicians ludicrously insist "has nothing to do with Islam" – is not alone in calling for jizya from Christian "infidels." In 2002, Saudi sheikh Muhammad bin Abdul Rahman, discussing the Muslim prophet's prediction that Islam will eventually conquer Rome, said, "We will control the land of the Vatican; we will control Rome and introduce Islam in it. Yes, the Christians ... will yet pay us the jizya, in humiliation, or they will convert to Islam."

And in a video recently posted, Sheik 'Issam Amira appears giving a sermon in Al Aqsa Mosque where he laments that too many Muslims think jihad is only for defense against aggressors, when in fact Muslims are also obligated to wage offensive jihad against non-Muslims:

When you face your pagan enemy, call them – either to Islam, jizya, or seek Allah's help and fight them. Even if they do not fight [or initiate hostilities], fight them! ... Fight them! When? When they fight you? No, when they refuse to convert to Islam or refuse to pay jizya. ... Whether they like it or not, we will subjugate them to Allah's authority.

In short, if the Islamic State is enforcing jizya on "infidels," demands for its return are on the increase all around the Muslim world. Put differently, if Abu Shadi, an Egyptian Salfi leader, once declared that Egypt's Christians "must either convert to Islam, pay jizya, or prepare for war," Dr. Amani Tawfiq, a female professor at Egypt's Mansoura University, once said that "[i]f Egypt wants to slowly but surely get out of its economic situation and address poverty in the country, the jizya has to be imposed on the Copts."

The Doctrine and History of Jizya

So what exactly is jizya?

The word jizya appears in Koran 9:29, in an injunction that should be familiar by now (emphasis added): "Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued."

In the hadith, the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad, regularly calls on Muslims to demand jizya of non-Muslims: "If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay jizya, seek Allah's help and fight them."

The second "righteous caliph," Omar al-Khattab, reportedly said that any conquered "infidel" who refuses to convert to Islam "must pay the jizya out of humiliation and lowliness. If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency."

This theme of non-Muslim degradation appears regularly in the commentaries of Islam's authorities. According to the MedievalIslamic Civilization Encyclopedia, Muslim "jurists came to view certain repressive and humiliating aspects of dhimma as de rigueur. Dhimmis [subjugated non-Muslim Christians and Jews] were required to pay the jizya publicly, in broad daylight, with hands turned palm upward, and to receive a smart smack on the forehead or the nape of the neck from the collection officer."

Some of Islam's jurists mandated a number of other humiliating rituals at the time of jizya payment, including that the presiding Muslim official slap, choke, and in some cases pull the beard of the paying dhimmi, who might even be required to approach the official on all fours, in bestial fashion.

The root meaning of the Arabic word "jizya" is simply to "repay" or "recompense," basically to "compensate" for something. According to the Hans Wehr Dictionary, the standard Arabic-English dictionary, jizya is something that "takes the place" of something else, or "serves instead."

Simply put, conquered non-Muslims were to purchase their lives, which were otherwise forfeit to their Muslim conquerors, with money. Instead of taking their lives, the conquerors took the money of the conquered. As one medieval jurist succinctly put it, "their lives and their possessions are only protected by reason of payment of jizya."

For instance, Amr bin al-As, the companion of Muhammad who conquered Christian Egypt in the early 640s, tortured and killed any Christian Copt who tried to conceal his wealth. When a Copt inquired of him, "How much jizya are we to pay?" the Islamic hero replied, "If you give me all that you own – from the ground to the ceiling – I will not tell you how much you owe. Instead, you [the Christian Copts] are our treasure chest, so that, if we are in need, you will be in need, and if things are easy for us, they will be easy for you."

Yet even that was not enough. Caliph Uthman later chided Amr bin al-As because another governor of Egypt had managed to increase the caliphate's treasury to double what Amr had. In the words of Uthman, the "milk camels [Egypt's Christians, that is] ... yielded more milk." Years later, yet another caliph, Suliman Abdul Malik, wrote to the governor of Egypt advising him "to milk the camel until it gives no more milk, and until it milks blood."

Little wonder Egypt went from being almost entirely Christian in the seventh century to today having a mere 10% – and steadily dwindling, thanks to ongoing persecution – Christian minority.

Related to the idea of institutionalized jizya is the notion that non-Muslims are fair game to plunder whenever possible. The jizya entry in the Encyclopaedia of Islam states that "with or without doctrinal justification, arbitrary demands [for money] appeared at times." Even that medieval traveler, Marco Polo, whose chronicles appear impartial, made an interesting observation concerning the Muslims in Tauris (modern day Iraq) in the thirteenth century:

According to their doctrine [Islam], whatever is stolen or plundered from others of a different faith, is properly taken, and the theft is no crime; whilst those who suffer death or injury by the hands of Christians [during the course of a plunder-driven raid], are considered as martyrs. ... These principles are common to all Saracens [Muslims].

All this is echoed in recent times by the words of Sheikh Abu Ishaq al-Huwaini, spoken a few years ago, concerning what the Muslim world should do to overcome its economic problems:

If only we can conduct a jihadist invasion at least once a year or if possible twice or three times, then many people on earth would become Muslims. And if anyone prevents our dawa [invitation to conversion] or stands in our way, then we must kill or take them as hostage and confiscate their wealth, women and children. Such battles will fill the pockets of the Mujahid [holy warrior] who can return home with 3 or 4 slaves, 3 or 4 women and 3 or 4 children. This can be a profitable business if you multiply each head by 300 or 400 dirham. This can be like financial shelter whereby a jihadist, in time of financial need, can always sell one of these heads.

So it was for well over a millennium: Muslim rulers and mobs extorted money from "infidels" under their sway as a legitimate way to profit.

Much of this financial fleecing came to an end thanks to direct European intervention. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, one Muslim region after another abolished the jizya and gave non-Muslims unprecedented rights – originally to appease Western powers, later in emulation of Western governance. The Ottoman Empire's Hatt-i Humayun decree of 1856 abolished the jizya in many Ottoman-ruled territories. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, the jizya was gradually abolished wherever Western powers were present.

Today, however, as Muslims reclaim their Islamic heritage – often to the approval and encouragement of a West now under the spell of "multiculturalism" – jizya, whether institutionalized as under the Islamic State or as a rationale to plunder infidels, is back.

Even in the West, in 2013, a U.K. Muslim preacher who was receiving more than 25,000 pounds annually in welfare benefits referred to British taxpayers as "slaves" and explained: "We take the jizya, which is our haq [Arabic for "right"], anyway. The normal situation by the way is to take money from the kafir [infidel], isn't it? So this is the normal situation. They give us the money – you work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar ["Allah is Great"]. We take the money."

Academic Lies about Jizya

Yet if Muslims – from Islamic State jihadis to Egyptian university professors – know the truth about jizya, the West is today oblivious, thanks to its leading authorities on Islam: Western academics and other "experts" and talking heads.

Consider the following excerpt from John Esposito, director of the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University and a widely acknowledged go-to source for anything Islamic (emphasis added):

In many ways, local populations [Christians, Jews, and others] found Muslim rule more flexible and tolerant than that of Byzantium and Persia. Religious communities were free to practice their faith to worship and be governed by their religious leaders and laws in such areas as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. In exchange, they were required to pay tribute, a poll tax (jizya)that entitled them to Muslim protection from outside aggression and exempted them from military service. Thus, they were called the "protected ones" (dhimmi). In effect, this often meant lower taxes, greater local autonomy[.]

Despite the almost gushing tone related to Muslim rule, the idea that jizya was extracted in order to buy "Muslim protection from outside aggression" is an outright lie. Equally false is Esposito's assertion that jizya was paid to "exempt them [non-Muslims] from military service" – as if conquering Muslims would even want or allow their conquered "infidel" subjects to fight alongside them in the name of jihad (holy war against infidels) without first converting to Islam.

Yet these two myths – that jizya was for "Muslim protection from outside aggression" and exemption from military service – are now widely accepted. In "Nothing 'Islamic' About ISIS, Part Two: What the 'Jizya' Really Means," one Hesham A. Hassaballa recycles these fabrications on BeliefNet by quoting Sohaib Sultan, Princeton University's Muslim chaplain, who concludes: "Thus, jizyah is no more and no less than an exemption tax in lieu of military service and in compensation for the 'covenant of protection' (dhimmah) accorded to such citizens by the Islamic state."

In reality and as demonstrated above via the words of a variety of authoritative Muslims, past and present, jizya was, and is indeed, protection money – though protection not from outsiders, as Esposito and others claim, but from surrounding Muslims themselves. Whether it is the first caliphate from over a millennium ago or whether it is the newest caliphate, the Islamic State, Muslim overlords continue to deem the lives of their "infidel" subjects forfeit unless they purchase it, ransom it with money. Put differently, the subjugated infidel is a beast to be milked "until it gives no more milk and until it milks blood," to quote the memorable words of an early caliph.

There is nothing humane, reasonable, or admirable about demands for jizya from conquered non-Muslim minorities, as the academics claim. Jizya is simply extortion money. Its purpose has always been to provide non-Muslims with protection from Muslims: pay up, or else convert to Islam, or else die.

And it is commanded in both the Koran and Hadith, the twin pillars of Islam. In short, jizya is yet another ugly fact of Islam – add to offensive jihad, imperialism, misogyny, slavery, etc. – one that, distort as they may, the academics cannot whitewash away, even as the world stands idly by watching its resumption in the twenty-first century.

The Left Goes Insane

Fay Voshell

It was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." On some levels, he was correct, but insanity is actually the substitution of fantasy for reality. The guy who believes he's Napoleon Bonaparte reincarnated and who is obsessively planning to re-conquer Europe is certifiably insane. The woman who believes she is Gaia and therefore divinized as a goddess is a nut case. Both are completely out of touch with reality and everyone surrounding them knows it.

But wholesale denial of reality is not limited to just the occasional individual. Insanity can and does afflict whole groups of people. As Charles Mackay stated in his work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841),

"We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."

How true.

Here in America, the madness of crowds is upon us. The Left has so suppressed the knowledge of reality and has so affixed itself to delusion that the crowds who comprise it and who follow it would have been straitjacketed a decade or two ago.

What are a few of the insane ideas being promulgated as truth by progressives?

One current insanity on the home front is the concept of "gender fluidity." Translated from newspeak into everyday language, "gender fluidity" means that any man can declare himself by fiat to be a woman -- or vice versa.

Another is that the unborn child within the womb is not really human but is "potential human life." It is insane to say that a fetus is a potential human being. It either is human or it is not.

Yet another sign the Left is completely detached from reality is the idea is that money may, like gender, be declared to be money strictly by fiat without any particular regard to underlying worth. Still another illusory concept is the idea that no system of morality; no governmental structure, and no religion can be acknowledged as having a position of superiority in comparison with another. Yet another is that the entire world order, material and societal, can be completely retrofitted in accordance with progressive thinking with only good results.

There's more -- much more -- of course. Any reader could probably give at least a dozen more examples.

How and why did the Left (and sometimes members of the Right who join them) go mad?

We can look to Eric Voegelin's Science, Politics and Gnosticism for some answers. Voegelin states that advocacy of most twentieth century nostrums such as the quackery of communism require that "the thinker suppresses an essential element of reality in order to be able to construct an image of man, or society, or history to suit his desires."

He writes that in order for the Left to maintain their dogma, certain realities must be excluded from thinking. "We shall not find the answer on the level of theoretic argument; for we have obviously gone beyond reason, if the relation to reality is so greatly disturbed that essential elements are on principle excluded from consideration."

In other words, in order to believe in the current dogmas of the Left, including the spurious quasi religion of "manmade climate change," one must suspend huge chunks of reality, effectually denying elements and evidence of the created order (science) as well as refusing to see the nature of humanity and society as they really are (philosophy and theology).

But the Left's denial of reality also means concealment of its ultimate goals. Among those goals are the wish for absolute rule and the conversion of humans by force rather than by reason and persuasion.

There is collateral damage that must be accepted if the Left is to succeed. One is the certainty that there are things human beings cannot change just because humans want them to change and/or plan detailed programs to change them. Among those realities are the basic material and spiritual constitution of human beings and the powerlessness of humans in the face of an unremittingly unchanging natural order. There are certain limitations built into the universe; certain fundamentals none of us can change. The attempt to change or destroy fundamental realities results not in transformation of the fixed order of being, but in mere phantasmagorical fantasies that ultimately result in madness. The attempt also results in the unmitigated suffering of humans as a neo-Gnostic elite, who believe they have infallible insight into how things should be, tries to destroy reality (things as they are) and to mold humanity and history according to its capricious image.

As Voegelin puts it:

"…the will to power of the Gnostic who wants to rule the world has triumphed over the humility of subordination of being. The result of victory is not really the acquisition of power. The constitution of being remains what it is -- beyond the thinker's lust for power. [Reality] is not changed by the fact that a thinker drafts a program to change it and fancies that he can implement that program. The result, therefore, is not dominion over being, but a fantasy satisfaction…. The temptation [is]to fall from uncertain truth into certain untruth…the thread on which hangs our knowledge of the order of being, its origin and meaning, is very thin."

The fall in to "certain untruth" is almost complete within the ranks of the increasingly mentally disturbed Left.

Further, because so much of what the Left is promulgating is in fact certain untruth, it must continually seek to cut off rational debates. It abhors questions about the veracity of its dogma and praxis.

Leftists believe it is vitally important to prohibit questions that might undermine them or their system's credibility. Nothing, absolutely nothing, about the dogma of the Left is to be questioned. It is only to be believed. That is one reason why the Left's current chief flag bearer, Hillary Clinton, so assiduously avoids questions. One must have absolute faith in her.

Believing Christians and devout Jews have ideas about the created order that are the polar opposite of the Left. They believe that created reality is a God given thing to which humans gratefully accommodate themselves. They do not believe that the created order was or is made by human beings.

For progressives, such beliefs are to be silenced and quashed. Progressive dogma is as sacred as Holy writ, but unlike the scriptures, it is completely safe from exegesis or criticism. As Voegelin points out, Leftists are types for "whom a human inquiry has become a practical impossibility."

In order to silence questions from the masses which it seeks to indoctrinate, progressives seek to erase opposition by shutting down free speech while pursuing the total destruction of any resistance. Meanwhile, it continuously indulges in what Voegelin describes as "stubborn, demonic persistence in actions that passion incites."

In sum, the Left's neo-Gnosticism and its accompanying lust for power and authority mean the creation of multifarious governmental, bureaucratic and administrative initiatives designed to destroy the current societal order and to "fundamentally transform" the nation and the world according to the fantastical dreams of an elite.

To accomplish such a transformation requires the ascendance of atheism and the deification of Man as Superman. The human being becomes the ruler of history and God is dead. In the place of the destruction of the Christian concepts of salvation and redemption, the Left substitutes its own salvific doctrines created entirely from the brains of elite humans who have godlike clairvoyance concerning the future order of being. God is permitted no input. Heaven will be a new world order springing like the phoenix from the ashes of the civilization we presently know and live in. No cost, human or material, is too great in order to achieve the leftist dream. Gotterdammerung is a necessary and even beautiful thing.

Ultimately, as Voegelin points out, neo-gnostism requires the murder of God and the total elevation of man's power. "The aim of parousiastic Gnosticism [as in Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidigger] is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man's creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order."

As we observe the destruction being wreaked on our beloved country by leftist progressives, it is obvious that their obsession with destroying the old order and fundamentally transforming the world is ultimately an exercise in futility. Meanwhile, the attempts to create a fantasy society are having disastrous consequences.

The core created order, no matter how it is tinkered with, and no matter how much destruction the Left attempts to achieve, remains unperturbed. It is simply not within man's purview to change the fundamental world order established by the Creator. It is man's glorious task to submit to, cooperate with and to be part of the divine redemptive plan for humanity and creation.

There is hope.

It may be that great thinkers of the Judeo-Christian tradition may rise up to destroy the insane leftist mental construct that will be, if not confronted and destroyed, the Moloch that burns the magnificent edifice of Western Judeo-Christian thought to ashes.

Fay Voshell is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. Her articles, which she has discussed on radio talk shows, have appeared many online publications. She holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her its prize for excellence in systematic theology. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com